Alabama Freedom Riders recall their fight for equal treatment
By Michael Sznajderman May 20, 2021
The Rev. Clyde L. Carter and his wife, Eva, stand next to a refurbished 1960s-era Greyhound bus at the Birmingham Public Library. Sixty years ago, Carter rode similar buses as part of the Freedom Rides in defiance of segregation. (Michael Sznajderman / Alabama NewsCenter)
Two Birmingham natives who participated 60 years ago in the historic Freedom Rides told their stories to an inquisitive and admiring crowd Wednesday evening at the Birmingham Public Library.
Catherine Burks-Brooks and the Rev. Clyde L. Carter weren’t on the first two buses that left Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961, that were attacked by pro-segregation mobs in Anniston and Birmingham. Rather, they were part of the subsequent wave of young blacks and whites who continued the rides on interstate buses later that month and through the summer of 1961 with the goal of permanently crushing segregated public tra
FreightWaves Haul of Fame: Roadway Express was an LTL leader for decades A Yellow tractor pulls a Roadway and a Yellow trailer. (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves)
The U.S. trucking industry grew in the years following World War I. Nonetheless, the industry was still in its early days, and railroads were the primary method of transportation for goods from point of manufacture to point of sale.
Early history
This did not deter brothers Carroll and Galen Roush, who founded Roadway Express in Akron, Ohio in 1930. Roadway Express entered the trucking industry as a less-than-truckload (LTL) carrier; its first load was transporting tires between Akron and St. Louis.
Editorial: Freedom Riders work still not done
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This iconic image shocked the world in 1961. Today still calls for the moral bravery of the Freedom Riders.Courtesy of Corbis
By the time the angry mob met the Greyhound bus carrying civil rights activists as it rolled into Anniston, Ala., on May 14, 1961, the civil rights movement was in a lull. The sit-ins of Southern lunch counters had been a year earlier. The first of the historic Alabama campaigns, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, ended in 1956, and the campaigns in Birmingham and Selma were two and four years away.
Racism was entrenched, the walls of segregation still in place as the fight to root out and overcome these evils continued. But the fight wasn’t often publicized. What was needed was a dramatic, nonviolent action that would spotlight a wrong and push Southern racists to commit, in public, the violence they usually committed in private. It happened during the sit-ins,
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